Olive Chancellor's cry for ‘a human voice’ comes just before Verena Tarrant is about to give her address in Miss Birdseye's apartment which will enthrall and captivate – in different ways – both Olive and her Southern cousin, Basil Ransom, and duly precipitate the action and struggles of the novel. The question of her ‘voice’ – its appropriation and development, its muffling and silencing – is central to the book, and this in turn opens up problems of rights and abilities of utterance, articulation, discourse, publication – speech and writing – in general, which are not only peculiarly pointed and relevant to the period of American history about which James was writing (the 1870s), but part – a central part – of a contestation and struggle which are endemic to our, and arguably any, society. It is a matter not only of who ‘has a voice’ – who holds the pen, who holds the floor – in society, but more searchingly of what is a voice, ‘a human voice’? It is because this is a matter of profound and permanent importance that I think James's novel about a group of Boston feminists in post-Civil-War America is as alive and urgent (and instructive) for us today as it was for his (mostly unappreciative) contemporaries.